Ability to attract and retain high quality, globally mobile talent is one of the attributes of internationalization, in an interconnected world. This is the theme of an article in China Daily, carried in an issue dated 13 May 2016. This publication is an official Chinese mouthpiece and will not carry anything critical of that country; with that caveat, the issue merits attention.

China’s decision to permit all families to have two children, announced on 29 October 2015, was long in coming. It was preceded by a concession earlier in that year, allowing those parents that were single children themselves to opt for a second child, after permission. The simple rationale behind all this has been a precipitous fall in the totalfertility rate (TFR) (i.e. the average number of children per woman in her lifetime); this is now at 1.55, i.e. significantly below the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1, which is what is needed for a stable population. This has several implications and consequences.[1]

In the past 25 years new concepts have entered the lexicon of international affairs. In 1990, Joseph Nye gave us the notion of soft power (SP), the ability of a country to attract others, to attain its goals through inducement and gentle persuasion, rather than exertion of hard power.[1] We also learnt to think of countries as brands (CB), possessed of images akin to commercial brands; such attributes had earlier sometimes been seen as national stereotypes. The difference now was that we realized that like all brands, country images could be marketed, enhanced and manipulated. At the same time, public diplomacy (PD) emerged as a new activity, or rather as an old wine in a new bottle, describing effort by governments to reach out to publics, foreign and to an extent also one’s own people, to influence their perceptions on international issues. We realized that image and country marketing affected inflows of foreign tourists, and the way foreign businessmen viewed one’s country as a destination for business and investments. This gave salience to these new forms of public communication.

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This blog reflects the thoughts of the ICS family on China and East Asia related issues. It is a platform for an open dialogue that aims to inform and enlighten, especially reaching out to young scholars and analysts. India and China need much closer mutual understanding to serve our mutual interests, and to work for better relations across Asia and the world.